How Romney got out-organized by Obama

posted at 8:14 pm on November 8, 2012 by Allahpundit

I’ve been hoarding links on this subject all day because it’s the other side of the coin of how Romney lost. One side is the demographic challenge, which everyone understands by now. The GOP depends heavily on older voters, white voters, and men, and that’s not a base that’s going to carry you eternally into victory in a changing America. The other side is turning out the voters you do have by running a superior organization. This was supposed to be Romney’s strength, the reason to prefer him to Gingrich, Santorum, etc. Even if he didn’t always seem so “severely conservative,” he could be trusted to hold his own against Team Hopenchange in a battle of the ground games. After all, that’s his brand — he’s a managerial genius. If anyone could build a company capable of capturing the presidency, he could.

But he couldn’t. The one piece I want you to read before any other is John Ekdahl’s account of how badly Romney’s “ORCA” system failed. The idea was to use smart phones to maintain de facto “strike lists,” which would help HQ figure out which precincts across the country were turning out in lower numbers and in need of extra resources. Ekdahl:

While I was home, I took to Twitter and the web to try to find some answers. From what I saw, these problems were widespread. People had been kicked from poll watching for having no certificate. Others never received their pdf packets. Some were sent the wrong packets from a different area. Some received their packet, but their usernames and passwords didn’t work.

Now a note about the technology itself. For starters, this was billed as an “app” when it was actually a mobile-optimized website (or “web app”). For days I saw people on Twitter saying they couldn’t find the app on the Android Market or iTunes and couldn’t download it. Well, that’s because it didn’t exist. It was a website. This created a ton of confusion. Not to mention that they didn’t even “turn it on” until 6AM in the morning, so people couldn’t properly familiarize themselves with how it worked on their personal phone beforehand.

Next, and this part I find mind-boggingly absurd, the web address was located at “https://www.whateveritwas.com/orca”. Notice the “s” after http. This denotes it’s a secure connection, something that’s used for e-commerce and web-based email. So far, so good. The problem is that they didn’t auto-forward the regular “http” to “https” and as a result, many people got a blank page and thought the system was down. Setting up forwarding is the simplest thing in the world and only takes seconds, but they failed to do it. This is compounded by the fact that mobile browsers default to “http” when you just start with “www” (as 95% of the world does).

End result: “30,000+ of the most active and fired-up volunteers were wandering around confused and frustrated when they could have been doing anything else to help.” That’s what was going on in RomneyWorld. Meanwhile, in ObamaWorld, they were using behavioral scientists to build a gigantic database of current and potential voters and to fine tune their message at a granular level not only to win people’s votes but to get them to turn out. Read Sasha Issenberg at Slate for more on that.

“There is not much of a commitment to that type of research on the right,” says Daron Shaw, a University of Texas at Austin political scientist who worked on both of George W. Bush’s presidential campaigns. “There is no real understanding of the experimental stuff.”

If Republicans brought consumer data into politics during Bush’s re-election, Democrats are mastering the techniques that give campaigns the ability to understand what actually moves voters. As a result, Democrats are beginning to engage a wider set of questions about what exactly a campaign is capable of accomplishing in an election year: not just how to modify nonvoters’ behavior to get them to the polls, but what exactly can change someone’s mind outside of the artificial confines of a focus group.

“The asset that Karl Rove and his team built during the Bush era, with consumer data—that was good and valuable, but it’s static data,” says Cyrus Krohn, a former Republican National Committee e-campaign director and founder of the political-tech startup Crowdverb. “The Democrats have figured out how to harness dynamic data on top of static data.”

Issenberg, who’s looked at microtargeting in depth, says Democrats are sufficiently far ahead on this that the GOP won’t close the gap anytime soon. Obama’s team also succeeded by emphasizing personal, one-on-one contact with voters; there was an 11-point gap when voters were asked if they’d been visited at home by a campaign in Pew’s poll taken last week. Even with something as simple as buying airtime for ads, Romney reportedly used an unusual in-house system that made things more expensive than they needed to be. Again: This is precisely the sort of thing that he wasn’t supposed to be outmaneuvered on. His ideological heresies were worrisome, but the comfort in nominating him was that his campaign would be smart and efficient enough to fight Obama to a stalemate. Instead, news is breaking tonight that even though Nate Silver and Drew Linzer and Simon Jackman and various other statistical modelers all had a high degree of confidence in how the election would go by the end, Romney himself was reportedly genuinely shellshocked when he realized he’d lost. (An NYT story on his address to staffers notes that defeat seemed to “genuinely startle him.”) According to a senior advisor, “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming.” With all the information they’d gathered from months of polling and voter outreach, no one inside the campaign had an inkling that Obama’s model of the election might be right? Even though Romney ended up trailing in the last national poll average before election day too? One Republican operative wondered to Politico whether the campaign’s cheery poll spin was a head fake, aimed at boosting GOP morale, or evidence that they just weren’t that smart. Now we know.

It pains me to say all that because I don’t want to scapegoat Romney. He’s a good man. There were, as I said, powerful demographic forces here that he was up against. Obama may well have run the best campaign organization ever assembled, and it’s hard to knock off an incumbent even in the best of times. I have no doubt that Romney’s ground game was stronger than any other GOP primary candidate’s ground game would have been. But that’s part of what makes this election result terrifying — the best manager in our presidential field got completely outmanaged. It’s hard enough to win when you’re at a disadvantage among registered voters, but when your guys can’t even keep pace organizationally with the opposition, you’re basically throwing elections away. Can’t anyone here play this game? I’ll leave you with this, from Jonathan Last:

There was, to my mind, only one qualitative argument generally made in favor of Romney: that his management experience made him uniquely qualified to be president. He was a “turn-around artist.” A “genius CEO.” Now even the claim that his private-sector ability to master organizations and rescue them was a variation on process. And it always struck me as a little dubious. For one thing, it’s not immediately clear how the skill set of the private-sector executive transfers to the job of managing the executive branch of the U.S. government. CEOs say jump and everyone around them says how high. The president says jump and half of Congress tries to countermand the order while getting him fired and the other branch of government gets to decide whether jumping is even theoretically allowed.

But at least this was a falsifiable claim. And the fact that Romney could not master even his own campaign organization in order to win an incredibly winnable election demonstrates–incontrovertiably–that it wasn’t true. If he was a turn-around artist, he would be president-elect right now.

Most political campaigns aren’t invalidated by a loss. A candidate puts forward an idea or a worldview and it can stand whether or not it’s embraced by voters. It has its own truth. But in the wake of his loss Romney’s campaign now looks ludicrous.

Obama’s massive advantage in the election was his propaganda arm- otherwise known as the mainstream media.

They did everything they could to protect him and his image, they disseminated his message, they deliberately avoided performing journalism so as not to highlight his many failings and scandals, they failed to challenge the many lies he told, they did their best to demonise Romney and, finally, they did all that they could to distort the policies Romney championed.

Hence, as I pointed out on another thread, the post at Twitchy about women who had stockpiled birth control pills in case Romney won!

Romney could have run the best, most efficient campaign in history but I really don’t think it would have mattered. Remember the war on women? Rolling the country back, oh a couple of years, to the state it was before Obama mandated that religious organisation have to pay for contraception was transformed into ‘Mitt wants to ban birth control and magically outlaw abortions.’

A 92 percent drop in absentee-ballot requests by military personnel in Virginia is raising concerns that the Pentagon is failing to carry out a federal voting law.

With only 1,746 military voters in Virginia requesting absentee ballots so far this year — out of 126,251 service members in the state —the Military Voter Protection Project says the system has broken down.

It sounds like there has been a massive mishandling of paperwork for voters in the military. Just the fact that there are 124, 505 fewer absentee ballots requests in the system suggests that something has gone terribly wrong. How does one lose voting paperwork from over 120,000 members of the armed forces? That’s a good question.

We see the stories of voter fraud and yet we continue to think it doesn’t matter. But how much of the fraud are we not seeing? How much of it has gone unnoticed?
The Democrat poll watchers that threw out the Republican ones in Philly… what do you think they actually did after they threw out the Republicans? Sit around and smoke cigarettes? Play cards? Do you think they might have added a few votes somehow to the system? How many would you guess? 10? 50?

Now think for a minute… seriously… you just threw out Republican poll watchers. Threw them right out onto the street. You’ve got a few hours. What are you going to do with your time? Add 50 votes? If you could get away with adding 50 votes why not a thousand? Why not 20,000? Why not add 50,000 votes to the whole Democrat ticket.

Oh no no… you would never do that. This is crazy talk. Those Democrats if they did anything at all suspicious or illegal they probably just had their grandmas in there voting twice or something. Don’t give it anymore thought or you might sound like a nutjob. Especially since this happened simultaneously around many polling stations in Philly. Had to be like that spontaneous mob thing over in Libya. Probably provoked by a Romney campaign button or something.

We need to blow the Republican Party’s head off–metaphorically speaking, of course. Wouldn’t to be blamed for someone’s premature demise.

And we need to it now:

Jake: What do you do when cockroaches get in the woodwork, Michael?
James McCandles: Smoke ’em out?
Jake: That’s right.
Michael McCandles: Why not wait for them to make the first move?
Jake: Because waiting is good for them and bad for us. You get impatient, nervy, careless and maybe dead

I think we lost because of technology. In the last two elections, Dems have used Big Data and the internet more effectively than Republicans to get their message out. We are never going to have enough volunteers or enthusiasm to overcome our technology deficit. It is sort of like, no matter how many horses drawn wagons you have, you aren’t going to be able to make it to the moon.

Most of the techies I know are atheist liberals. Christians need to encourage their kids to go into computer science, engineering, physics (esp. quantum mechanics), and math (esp. statistics/probability). Artificial intelligence is going to play a bigger and bigger role in our lives, and I really fear for humanity if Christians are not playing a dominant role in developing this technology.

Guys, I admit that Romneys GOTV and voter contact stuff should have been better. But come on. Why did ANY conservative or GOP voter need to be told to get off the couch and vote? They all knew it was election day and what was at stake. Many just didnt seem to give a crap. Romney was a great candidate, IMO.

Jack_Burton on November 8, 2012 at 8:54 PM

This is true. Democrats round people up like cattle and haul them off to vote…but as a general rule Republicans are more self reliant and they do not need to bussed to the polls. There is no excuse for any Republican not voting. If they needed help getting to the polls it was available. Lazy.

Well, guys, we can complain about media bias, demographic shifts, and the Jersey-Shore-ification of America.

But it’s not like Karl Rove and Lee Atwater back in their heydays did that. They realized they had to be better than the opposition to win, and they buckled down and made sure they were – and won.

Karl Rove’s techniques now seem as dated as Mark Hanna’s. But that only means the pace of change has quickened. And if the GOP can find the right men to learn the right lessons, David Axelrod may seem as quaint and obsolete in 2020 as Rove does now – if we don’t give up in despair.

the orca thing seems absurd to me! I am an IT person, and its not really about technology, its about change managment and how to roll out the technology to ppl and how to do proper field test to make sure the technology works as intended. I am surprised that for someone with the background of mitt, there was such a sloppy work managing the information systems.

I would point out Reagan relied heavily on old white male voters to oust Carter.

Demographics don’t account for aging people changes to more conservative.

It happened before it will happen again.

No Conservative does well with young voters and the less strong the candidate does overall the worse the youth vote so that in cases where the Republican candidate loses it looks like a catastrophe.

I worry about race demographics because that doesn’t change but this hand-wringing about young people always staying the same as voters is something that never happened in the past.

If you haven’t heard a I voted for Carter story as the person laughs you haven’t been around long enough to meet all the conservatives who are older who would never vote for a liberal now that they know it is BS.

I would remind people also Obama OPPOSED Gay Marriage in 2008 and did just as well.

Mitt Romney’s son Matt uttered five words about President Obama while campaigning in Hawaii that you wouldn’t expect from the son of the leading Republican presidential candidate: “I think he is great.”

The younger Romney made the comments in an interview with Hawaii television station KITV4 while campaigning for his dad in the Aloha State, which is holding its election contests Tuesday.

Matt Romney will likely tell his dad that he was making a larger point about how Mitt would be a better president.

“I’m not here to talk about President Obama,” Matt said in the television interview. “I think he is great. I’m here to talk about my dad and what he would bring to the country.”

Guys, I admit that Romneys GOTV and voter contact stuff should have been better. But come on. Why did ANY conservative or GOP voter need to be told to get off the couch and vote? They all knew it was election day and what was at stake. Many just didnt seem to give a crap. Romney was a great candidate, IMO.

Jack_Burton on November 8, 2012 at 8:54 PM

exactly. On one called me. I’m not on any call list. I get Dem/R mailings every election…pitch them all

This is about right as rain. There is no way that Romney could match in four months what Obama’s team had been building for four years. What’s really scary is that they’ll use the same protocol for 2014/16 and beyond so if the RNC wants to have a snowballs chance in hell in those years they’d better get cracking, like yesterday. I personally think that the Dems have such a head start that unless the RNC steps out of the box now and begins to consider new ideas that we’ll at best get Biden in 2016 or at worst get HRC. This can be done they just have to want to do it and check their arrogance at the door.

Half the population is zombies. No one told us there is a zombie invasion on. It’s that simple. They walk among us.
What do we do about it? I know what they always do in zombie movies when it’s the end of the world zombie invasion scenario’s. Lock and loa…Lock your doors I mean (big brother is watching gotta be careful what you say nowadays).

As they say, hindsight is 20/20. But now I remember that Romney was a successful manager in the 1990’s. The world in which he operated was drastically different than the one we now inhabit. And I am not talking about demographics or business climate; I am talking about technology. The failings of the Romney GOTV effort (and in the final analysis the Romney voters who didn’t get to a polling place are an indication not of indifference, but of GOTV meltdown), from descriptions I am now reading, are simply a case of too many “unknown unknowns” overwhelming them when the rubber met the road.

Perhaps I am more sensitive to this because my business is based on helping bridge the gap between the “legacy” business model (which relies too much on the personal touch and steam-powered machinery) and the world of technology (which relies on data manipulation too heavily). There is, however, a “happy medium” between the two, applying best practices of both, which the Romney campaign utterly failed to identify.

As they say, “oops”. Or as the youth of today would have it, “dude, my bad”.

Most of the techies I know are atheist liberals. Christians need to encourage their kids to go into computer science, engineering, physics (esp. quantum mechanics), and math (esp. statistics/probability). Artificial intelligence is going to play a bigger and bigger role in our lives, and I really fear for humanity if Christians are not playing a dominant role in developing this technology.

bitsy on November 8, 2012 at 9:01 PM

I agree with all you say, but, did you know that science universities are a hive of godless atheism? I know that because I took my computer science degree in one of them and also met many like minded atheists there.
I already was an atheist before going to college but I have seen many young losing their faith there.

Romney’s team shouldn’t have had these issues. But likely it’s cobbled together. But the left has a standing army, while we have the national guard. Nothing against the National Guard (I was 5 yars active and 3 years NG), but just trying to make a point.

Just listening to Cunningham now on Fox, he’s saying the same thing. Obama kept the campaign office open in Ohio, starting in 2009 !

But today the conservative ideals are not wanted..not yet.
Even though a majority of people live by conservative ideas..
They just haven’t connected the dots..
2016…this country will be much different..

Yes GOTV could have been better. But the Dems need it more due to the type of voters they get. It also does not explain why GOP senate candidates (not just Akin) fell short in states Romney did well in. And a failed campaign does not negate Romney’s career at Bain and the SLC Olympics. He is a turnaround artist. He couldn’t directly run the campaign, no Presidential candidate can. He ended up trusting the wrong people.

Ignore the trimmers. There’s no need for radical change. The other party thinks it owns the demographic future — counter that in one stroke by fixing the Latino problem. Do not, however, abandon the party’s philosophical anchor. In a world where European social democracy is imploding before our eyes, the party of smaller, more modernized government owns the ideological future.

Romney is a good man who made the best argument he could, and nearly won. He would have made a superb chief executive, but he (like the Clinton machine) could not match Barack Obama in the darker arts of public persuasion.

The answer to Romney’s failure is not retreat, not aping the Democrats’ patchwork pandering. It is to make the case for restrained, rationalized and reformed government in stark contradistinction to Obama’s increasingly unsustainable big-spending, big-government paternalism.

Republicans: No whimpering. No whining. No reinvention when none is needed. Do conservatism but do it better. There’s a whole generation of leaders ready to do just that.

Yea, that attitude right there is probably better than half the reason Obama was reelected, good looking out as$hole.

SWalker on November 8, 2012 at 9:01 PM

Looking out for what? Romney was Obama lite, grandfather of Obamneycare, a liberal blue state Republican. If the GOP run a real conservative, 2x as many Americans self-identify as conservative as liberal. A conservative on the ballot wins.

We’re arguing a teleology. Because Romney lost, his campaign was incompetent and made all the wrong moves.

Had he won, we’d be lauding him for how smart his campaign was to not go too negative, to hold off on biographical details until late in the campaign, and to spend money in the places we spent the most.

Yea, that attitude right there is probably better than half the reason Obama was reelected, good looking out as$hole.

SWalker on November 8, 2012 at 9:01 PM

Looking out for what? Romney was Obama lite, grandfather of Obamneycare, a liberal blue state Republican. If the GOP run a real conservative, 2x as many Americans self-identify as conservative as liberal. A conservative on the ballot wins.

sauldalinsky on November 8, 2012 at 9:18 PM

He wants conservatives to vote for liberals so we can show those evil liberals who’s boss.

The GOP doesn’t have a policy problem. It has a bit of a message problem. But as this article points out, what REALLY kills the GOP is a massive organizational problem.

Instead of a bunch of PACs making “independent” attack ads for their candidate, we need a market research firm, a great customer contact organization, and a few smart statistical modellers.

America needs us to win. Heck, the world needs us to win. We can’t count on people magically realizing the value of our ideas. We need to use better tools, and make sure we understand the best ways to craft our messages.

GOP candidates clearly don’t get any training on their message. George Allen left the Senate because of sloppy message discipline. But “macacca” was nothing compared to the poor skills presented by this year’s Senate candidates. Those errors are ALL PREVENTABLE. You don’t have to abandon your ideals to say things in a manner that maximizes the appeal of those ideals.

Defending Romney by trotting out Obama’s flip-flops is a losing argument. You want to replace the guy in office and you defend your candidate by saying he’s no different than what they already have? Romney’s flip-flops go to his credibility as being a vehicle for change. If he cannot offer change then what is the point of voting for more of the same?

sharrukin on November 28, 2011 at 8:33 PM

I love the wisdom of the Monday Morning Quarterback, who by definition can never be wrong.

Good Solid B-Plus on November 8, 2012 at 9:21 PM

What about Quarterback who were telling you months and years ahead of time what was going to happen?

WTF do you think Zuckerberg and Obama were talking about all those times they made out? The weather? This is what facebook and google do. It is their bread and butter.

Whatever, we need a newer Karl Rove that is from the information age. That Jim Messina sure is creepy but all that time on internet chat rooms taught him a thing or 2 about data mining.

The dems got out the vote better, not as good as the first time around but still better. GWB and McCain didn’t have better GOTV operations than Romney, its just that more old people died in the last 8 years. We aren’t making enough new Republicans because we don’t control the public schools, the entertainment industry, google, facebook and twitter.

We’re arguing a teleology. Because Romney lost, his campaign was incompetent and made all the wrong moves.

Had he won, we’d be lauding him for how smart his campaign was to not go too negative, to hold off on biographical details until late in the campaign, and to spend money in the places we spent the most.

Good Solid B-Plus on November 8, 2012 at 9:19 PM

No. If he won, it would’ve been DESPITE software errors, a lack of training, and poor use of their TV money. Winning doesn’t mean perfection, and if you think winning cures all ills, you’re not trying to constantly be the best.

I was hearing stories about the hard work democrats were doing in Colorado years ago. They put in the effort to understand how to win voters. Right now the GOP thinks they can win with magic markers, poster board, and a big pile of money. But that won’t beat a team with smartphones, laptops, and a massive database of voter information that they mine in a sophisticated manners.

The GOP should try to run the PERFECT campaign every time, using the best possible tools. They have the money. They have the manpower. And they have the best ideas. Basically, we have a great product, poorly marketed.

We have miles to go to catch up with the left on this front. We have lots of high priced people who wring their hands on cue for Politico and yet volunteers are left dangling in the wind. There needs to be a massive reorganization from the GOP. I hope they are reading the writing on the wall.

msmveritas on November 8, 2012 at 8:37 PM

This, and also a real game plan for dealing with the MSM. The Left has been defining the GOP for way too long and the image is already set in stone. Listening to Rush today, I heard a couple callers repeat the mantra they’ve always heard from the media that Republicans are too old, too white and too male. If anyone had tuned in to the GOP Convention, they would have seen and heard otherwise, but the GOP seems to have a singular inability to take those aspects of the convention and parlay them into a strong brand identity. They need to find a way to do it even with the fact that 51% of people only care about their freebies.

People in the GOP seem to know nothing about opposition research and studying their tactics to use for themselves. Hell, I remember hearing some Libertarian PR guy on the Jerry Doyle show back in September who was talking about doing just that — he stole ideas from the Left, the Right, from anywhere, because he saw that the tactics worked and he saw nothing wrong with it if it allowed him to win.

The dems got out the vote better, not as good as the first time around but still better. GWB and McCain didn’t have better GOTV operations than Romney, its just that more old people died in the last 8 years. We aren’t making enough new Republicans because we don’t control the public schools, the entertainment industry, google, facebook and twitter.

cep on November 8, 2012 at 9:28 PM

Think about Obama’s GOTV effort. The bloom was off the rose – people clearly aren’t excited about him. Conservatives were eager to get him out of office. So how did they get out more voters than Romney?
Step 1- figure out what messages would motivate people to vote Obama.
Step 2- find messages that would lower GOP turnout.
Step 3- target the best messages to various target audiences.
Step 4- follow up with individual voters, assess their reactions.
Step 5- tweak your messages, repeat steps 1-4.

We can do the same thing – the conservative message would resonate with Latinos, with Asians, with youth, and with a lot of African-Americans. But we don’t have the research to make sure we tell our story in the best way. And we lack the discipline to always say things the right way to the right people.

What Allah did not tell you in the article is they used to do paper stike lists and they worked just fine for years.

Romney devised this new web app.

The premise that Republicans all need to vote under their own initiative is a fallacious assumption. People always need to be persuaded to do things at times and for a variety of reasons. We don’t know what has been going on in their lives and personal contact can make a huge difference.

Given the mess in many locations, many folks might legitimately feel that day they just don’t feel up to going and standing in line for 3 hours. Elderly especially.

The ground game explains a lot of the missing 3 million votes, if indeed it ends up being that amount.

If you are running for 2016, better start putting a plan together now. It will take that long.

Fraud, some for sure. However, why did the dems build a gazillion dollar gotv system, invested in technology, hired behavioral scientists to microtarget, build operations throughout the country ? Easier and cheaper to print ballots, right ?

I don’t think Republicans have to catch up to the Dem on their techniques. Nor would I want them to. I find the database driven view of looking at each voter ass an collection of surface and lifestyle variables creepy. Screw that. I think we can do better by leapfrogging them with other, better and more organic voter communication and persuasion.

Also, I really thought Romney and Ryan did better at explaining conservatism than any R candidate in some time, perhaps since Reagan. They should have made commercials that explain in small doses the tenets of conservatism, in simple language, without talking points:

1) Yes, raising taxes on people who make more money is bad for job creation. But, what if it wasn’t? What about the morality of it? Don’t we all want to work hard and create wealth? We shouldn’t envy success but work for it.

2) Discuss the benefit of local government. Why is it better to let states make decisions?

I love how all the finger pointers leave out the obvious reasons Romney lost.

1. No incumbent POTUS has ever lost an election without being weakened by a primary challenge first. Obama didn’t have to worry about facing attacks from within the Dem party while the GOP was fighting amongst each other & doing his work for him. Wonder why it was so easy for Obama to “define” Romeny — he was running tape of the attacks made against him by Perry, Santorum & Newt — “Hey don’t believe me that Romney’s a vulture capitalist? Look at what his GOP challengers had to say [runs tape]” was an actual ad run by Obama during the GOP primay.

2. Obama isn’t just any incumbent — he’s half black & he’s got the MSM covering for him like no other POTUS in history (see Pat Caddell’s epic rant if you don’t believe me). Seriously, the MSM flat out lied about the state of the economy & covered up the deaths of 4 Americans in a terrorist attack (including a US Ambassador) to help Obama. CNN’s Candy Crowley helped Obama lie directly to the American people about calling it a terrorist attack on “Day 1” while CBS suppressed a portion of an interview with Obama on “Day 1” wherein he flat out denied calling it a terrorist attack. Meanwhile, they created — sometimes from distortions and sometimes from whole cloth — “gaffes” by Romney & fact check the heck out of every word he uttered calling things “false” that were *technically* true but *could be* misleading while allowing Obama to outright lie about every.single.position Romney put forth (“$50 trillion tax cut!” “He wants to liquidate the auto industry!” etc.) as well as his personal character (Felon! Murderer!). This all helped Obama suppress Romney’s turnout while he ginned up his base with vile rhetoric (“Voting is the best revenge!” “They want to put y’all back in chains!” “Vote like your ladyparts depend on it!”) Meanwhile, when Romney criticized Obama’s failure to keep his 2008 campaign promises he was called a racist.

3. Union thugs with paid days off to harass, intimated & drive people to the polls gives you a leg up on “ground game.” A student of my mom’s told her she was grateful Obama won because “Romney was going to take away my mom’s welfare.” Turns out this is what “the man from OFA” told them.

4. More than half the electorate are spoiled takers who not only want the government to tell them what to do, they are willing to trade freedom for free stuff. I thought this election was about stopping us from reaching the tipping point — turns out we’re already there. Heck, I’m starting to think we were already there in 2008 and it wasn’t Bush fatigue that allowed the guy who sat in Rev. Wright’s church for 20 years to be elected POTUS.

That’s why Obama won. Romney’s campaign made mistakes — no doubt, every campaign does — but trying to pretend anyone else could have done better or won against Obama is pure fantasy. The election results proved it.

But enough with the all the wailing that we could have won if only we had nominated the mythical TruCon messiah (who apparently couldn’t be bothered to run)! How was your imagined savior going to beat Obama if they couldn’t even beat Romney in the primaries? Kind of hard to argue that Mitt was a bumbling incompetent in the general election, but was ten feet tall in the primaries many months earlier.

But why should all this be up to Romney? The Republicans should work on this at the party level…the candidates can not do everything.

Terrye on November 8, 2012 at 8:58 PM

Good point. Strange that during the campaign, Boehner/McConnell/Cornyn/ and the rest of the Republican Party Elites weren’t out campaigning/helping. I may be missing some but don’t recall seeing those three anywhere.

Speaking of opposition research, I think that in the future the Super PACs, the RNC and the nominee’s team should devote a few million dollars to researching the primary players in the media, as they are indeed as much of an opponent, if not more so, than the Dem nominees.

Let’s take a close look at them, their divorces, their adultery, their drug use, their financial dealings, their wives’ and children’s and friends’ indiscretions and crimes, you name it.

There’s a plethora of the new media ready to roll all this out, if the media players want to mess with us.

This is war, and I’ve had enough of these cretins screwing with our people and message, and giving a pass to the other side.

Right- conservatives could deliver a great, uplifting message on TV. We could harness the MSM to communicate a message about the waste in government, and the plight of inner cities, and the success of inner city students in charter schools.

But we need to study how to best tell those stories, and not waste the time we do get on TV. Liberals do a great job of staying on message in interviews. It’s not fun, or authentic, but they hammer their messages home.

We also need to stop accepting liberal premises. John Stossel does a great job of this. He presents familiar liberal ways of thinking, then takes them apart and shows why they’re wrong. The rape questions in the Senate camapigns should’ve been easy to disarm. But nobody has coached GOP candidates on how to respond and stay on message.

If Romney couldn’t motivate them to care then how was he a good candidate?

Romney was Obama-lite and they saw no reason to get excited about that.

sharrukin on November 8, 2012 at 8:58 PM

This too. The fraud machine that carried Reid to re-election was brought nation-wide.

Don’t give me the b.s. that Kos/SEUI run PPP & Obama flack Nate Silver were “so accurate” — they were “accurate” because they were given the narrative beforehand. NO ONE — not Michael Barone who wrote the book on elections, not Ras who’s gotten projected party ID right in the last 3 previous elections — got it right but PPP did? No.

I saw the abysmal Obama crowds — could barely get 4000 on his own; 10,000 with Jay-Z & Katy Perry — and I saw the huge Romney crowds — 10,000 plus with 1000s more turned away due to being over-capacity both before *and* after Sandy. I saw Obama’s speech Monday election-eve in Iowa where he rambled that this was his “last election — it’s up to you!” slumped over the podium with tears streaming down his face and Romney’s that same night in Manchester, NH were the 12,000+ crowd cheered so loudly & for so long that Romney couldn’t start his stump speech for 10 minutes.

But why should all this be up to Romney? The Republicans should work on this at the party level…the candidates can not do everything.

Terrye on November 8, 2012 at 8:58 PM

What DID the National GOP do? They should be the big warehouse of data, and constantly recruiting new candidates, and constantly working with candidates to make sure they’re viable.

We’re supposed to be the free market party – but the Left is using the tools of great free market businesses to win. These things aren’t expensive. A few million spent wisely could catch us up with the Dems within a year, AND give us a plan to field great candidates, AND a plan to counter the Dems’ most frequent attacks. They always use the same plays, and we’re always surprised.

Even on this very site the Romney claque were denouncing Tea Partiers and social conservatives as divisive and a problem with independents etc. Hey, you know what? It turns out that if you go to war with your own base, you lose.

The GOP should try to run the PERFECT campaign every time, using the best possible tools. They have the money. They have the manpower. And they have the best ideas. Basically, we have a great product, poorly marketed.

hawksruleva on November 8, 2012 at 9:28 PM

Ehh… but as conservatives shouldn’t we realize there isn’t such thing as perfect? What I mean to say, would it not work to allow competition among the state and local field offices? Provide them the resources and tools to get the job done… they can take from a choice established processes or piece together their own. One office can draw from a national database, while another can spend the time to create their own… because the volunteers there happen to know their local area much better than any consumer/demographic database. Trust each field office to create, edit and buy air time for their own custom campaign ads. Can you imagine seeing an internet video ad that was shot just down the street?! That’s only possible in a highly decentralized campaign.

It was not a consipracy. Obama won because his team personally asked more voters to come out. And they targeted ads to his voters that encouraged them to vote. They weren’t enthused, but they complied.

Research shows that the best way to get somebody to click on a banner on the web is to include the words “click here”. My guess is that research also shows that the best way to get a voter to the polls is to have a human knock on their door and ask them to vote. Dems did that better than we did.

Romney asked me for money – often. But nobody from the campaign asked me to vote. And I live in Virginia, in a city that Romney, Ryan, McCain, and Romney’s sons all visited. If they never contacted me, imagine all the less-intense voters who were never reached.

Well, good luck finding someone who fits your “pre-eminence of Conservatism” who can actually win.

The_Jacobite

Sorry, misread your post earlier.

Plus, he’s a SQUISH on immigration.

PappyD61

That’s funny. You actually think immigration will be an issue in 2016, lol. Haven’t you been paying attention for the past 2 days? They’re writing an amnesty plan right now that Boehner is dying to have Obama sign. You don’t have to worry about Rubio going weak on immigration, because that’s being taken care right now as I type this. We’ll have a new amnesty under way in less than a year, and that will officially be it for the republican party. Rubio won’t even be able to win.

First, the RNC is the ones to blame, they have been culpable and desperate to abuse power, even enabling an Obama second term, because their dream is Jeb Bush in 2016, and the vast majority of conservatives reject that ambition. Jeb Bush is a vile piece of excrement and will never be allowed to abuse power in the name of his globalist ambitions he is the same as Obama.

Romney didn’t get “out-organized” by Obama, the media RNC leadership, and other RINOs, and their Marxist libertarian and neo-con pals all promoted what Obama needed to insure a win, to discourage and make blue collar white Americans feel it was pointless, that Romney didn’t care. Obama and the media’s ploy was to push Romney to Hispander, the lie that a candidate is dependent on what constitutes 4% of the population as being more important than the 86% that’s white, and the 12% that is black (US citizens of Hispanic ancestry are only 4% of the population, the remaining numbers are illegal). Romney’s ratings among white blue collar type voters fell off after he started being pushed to Hispander, Obama didn’t gain those voters, but he didn’t need to, he only needed them to feel Romney was disconnected from their lives and more likely to stay home, why else do you think Obama kept hitting Romney with accusations of outsourcing, to ram the disconnected rich guy image. Now hear this, the welfare queens of the Obama supporting Hispanics will never vote GOP, unless the GOP become welfare queen subsidizing panderers, which means tax and spend. Obama and the leftist media are now hoping to finish the job and Boehner’s now making sounds about being open to immigration reform. Anyone that claims Rubio and Cruz are the future of the GOP aren’t interested in the future of the GOP, because while I”m sure Rubio and Cruz are nice enough, allowing them to push their desired amnesties and dream acts will make the US more of a leftist hellhole than it is, and it will render it so permanently. If you want to stop this, stop listening to libertarians and neo-cons, remember that Jeb Bush is NOT ever a worthwhile candidate, and the fact is, the RNC as it stands is the enemy too. We need to replace the RNC, not the republican party, and we can do it by wholesale rejection of the RNC. Take over your state republican parties and get them to reject the national. It must be done and done now.

Speaking of opposition research, I think that in the future the Super PACs, the RNC and the nominee’s team should devote a few million dollars to researching the primary players in the media, as they are indeed as much of an opponent, if not more so, than the Dem nominees.

TXUS on November 8, 2012 at 9:43 PM

Very good point, and they all need to be on the same page, with the same attack message. And I’m sure you probably already know this, but most of the major players in the media are or have been married to prominent Dems and vice versa. Wasn’t Martha Ravitz once married to Julius Genachowski, the head of the FCC? Didn’t Obama attend their wedding? All these people in the media and in the administration are interchangeable.